Some weeks ago I wrote about the importance of landing pages of a website. To summarize, I basically stated that it’s important to choose two, maybe three actions you want visitors to perform when entering a page. Examples for those actions are downloading a trial version or taking the tour of your product.
This time, I’d like to elaborate the topic by presenting a simple concept to measure the success or failure after redesigning the landing page. For this concept, you need a somewhat decent web stats analyzer which can display the amount of visitors which entered and exited a page. To analyze the success of a landing page, just divide the amount of entered visitors by the amount of exits and you get a value which I like calling the landing page index (or LPI for short – yes, I like three letter acronyms). Now, by calculating the LPI before and some weeks after applying changes to your landing page, you have quite a decent technique to rate their success. If the new LPI is higher than the old one, the landing page has been improved.
If more visitors are leaving immediately after entering a landing page, the exit value increases and thus the LPI decreases. In contrast, if more of them stay on your website than before, the exit value decreases over time and the LPI increases. I know it’s not really an exact and scientific method, but I think it gives a good understanding of how visitors react to changes regarding your landing pages.
